1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a page printer that includes a print engine for printing a document by the page and a data preparing section for preparing page data for one page on the basis of print data input, and supplying the page data to the print engine to perform a printing process.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, a conventional page printer is connected through an interface cable to a terminal device, which has a word processing function, of a host computer, for example. When a text prepared in the terminal device is printed by the page printer, print data including character codes is sent from the terminal device through the interface cable to the page printer, and the page printer analyzes the print data, and prepares a bit pattern corresponding to one page and stores in the database in the RAM. In the above-mentioned analysis process, the CPU constituting a control section of the page printer reads a font pattern that matches the input character code from a CG-ROM having font patterns of different characters stored therein, and forms a bit pattern of the font, which was read, in a specified position in the database. In a case that outline font patterns are stored in the CG-ROM, the above-mentioned analysis process includes the development of a mathematical formula expressing different outline font patterns. Bit patterns for one page obtained by this analysis process, that is, page data is supplied to a control section of the print engine in synchronism with a drive timing of the print engine that actually executes printing, and the print engine prints a text for one page on a sheet of paper on the basis of the page data.
However, there has been no conventional page printer that has been arranged to preserve the page data prepared by the analysis process after printing is finished. For this reason, when a text prepared by the operator has been printed by the page printer and the same text is to be printed again as occasion demands, the print data must once again be sent from the terminal device to the page printer through the interface cable and analyzed, so that it takes a long time until printing of the text is finished through the same text printed once before is printed again.
When the execution of the word processing program for creating or formatting a document has been terminated in the terminal processor or the power supply to the terminal device has been turned off, the word processing program needs to be started, then text data stored in a floppy disk, for example, is loaded, followed by the transmission and analysis of the print data as described above. Thus, a longer time is required till the end of printing of the text.